Vancouver Was Awesome: Revelstoke: A Kiss in the Wind

In 1915, a 28 year-old Italian immigrant named Angelo Conte was killed while working on a construction crew building a railway tunnel near Revelstoke, two and a half years after he arrived in Canada. Like many Italian men who migrated to BC in the early twentieth-century, Angelo left behind his family in the hopes of eventually reuniting, either by returning to Italy with money earned from working in Canada, or saving enough to bring his young wife and the child he never met over here to start a new life in a new land.

Angelo’s descendants knew virtually nothing about his immigration experience until almost a century later when his great grandson, Nicola Moruzzi, discovered a stack of letters Angelo wrote to his wife. Nicola travelled to BC to retrace Angelo’s steps in Strathcona (which included Vancouver’s Little Italy a century ago) and Revelstoke. Along the way he dug through local archives and museums to provide historical context and uncover more details about the last leg of Angelo’s journey. Now Nicola has launched an Indiegogo campaign to make a film about his discoveries. For more info, see James Johnstone’s post at When An Old House Whispers.